This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem â€“ the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all. The story concludes: â€œSo if you run the CD in your personal computer, by the end of it, the Minnesota GOP will not only know what you think on particular issues, but also who you are.â€?

Privacy schmivacy! This is the GOP Rootkit, part of their Political Rights Management Program! Your business is Karl Rove's business! Your privacy aids terrorists!

These practices fall way below the standard for todayâ€™s polling firms and web sites. The norm for polling firms is to anonymize the data and report only statistical totals. The norm for commercial web sites is to have a privacy policy, with Federal Trade Commission enforcement if the web site breaks its privacy promise.

Without a privacy policy, the state party can tell your views to anyone at all. If you give the â€œwrongâ€? answers on abortion or other issues, they can tell your boss, members of your church, or anyone else. In fact, these answers could get distributed to campaigns in your town during get-out-the-vote efforts â€“ precisely the place where â€œwrongâ€? answers can be most damaging.

GOP = Get Over Privacy.

In a comment, SpudgeBoy points out that this is illegal. All I can say is "Since when has that stopped the Republicans?"

Nobody seems to disagree that the Democratic Party, as it is now, is a mess. They've been ineffective, even when measured by the diminished expectations of an opposition party. So here we are in an election year. What to do about it?

Matt Stoller seems to think that the Democrats need more politicians who oppose women's rights over their own bodies. People like card-carrying members of "Democrats for Life." People like Tim Ryan.

Look, House Democrats, we WANT to defend you. We WANT to take the House back, so YOU'LL have the ability to GOVERN and wield power. We care about the country. But help us, a little bit. I mean come on, throw us a bone here, put some fresh faces in there, maybe a Tim Ryan or someone, anyone, who hasn't taken a trip on Abramoff's dime. It's not rocket science.

What's also not rocket science is realizing that so-called Democrats on the right-wing of the spectrum are the Democrats hurting the party. They're the ones not holding the line on the votes. They're the ones siding with the most conservative Republican party in modern memory on such issues as bankruptcy and, yes, confirmation of arch-conservative judges and justices.

[W]e are not hearing enough about these real issues, and that is the problem with the Democrats.

Each Democrat on the committee is pursuing over and over again the same issues without any depth or ability to drill into the most important ones except superficially. Why wasn't it possible for Pat Leahy to meet with his peers weeks prior to these hearings and divvy up the workload, and assign each senator with a particular part of Alito's record to go after? Why wasn't Dianne Feinstein and her staff tasked with drawing up questions and a line of attack on Alito's spousal consent position on abortion? Why wasn't Durbin and his staff assigned the Vanguard line of attack? Why wasn't Biden given the line of attack on executive powers? Why didn't Leahy focus on pinning Alito down on Roe? Why wasn't Kohl assigned the strip-search case, and some of his other questionable rulings? And why wasn't one of them assigned to make a big deal of the Bush White House hiding the remaining documents?

You get my drift. This should have been tasked out so that each senator and their staff would have been the expert and "prosecutor" if you will on a different part of Alito's record, and each given a chance to pointedly focus on things of relevance, like his actual record, so that the hearing would serve to educate the media and the public on what the guy has actually written and been overturned on, rather than how the big bad Democrats made his wife cry on cue.

And it would also help if the Democrats had planned ahead to set up a media war room that would debunk the misstatements and lies told by the media about Alito's record, so that the media was held to immediate account for what they falsely reported and what the GOP senators were getting away with. But no war room was set up, nor were the Democrats on the committee deployed effectively to act as prosecutors, instead of a granstanding herd of wandering cats.

It could have been different if Dianne Feinstein had really cared about Alito's record on women, wives, and choice, or if Biden really cared about executive power, or if the rest of them had the brainpower and committment necessary to act as an effective team trying to get to the bottom of the man's record and to make the case that he is the wrong guy at this time.[bold emphasis added]

Steve Soto sums it up with the all-too-true statement:

We live in a time where the GOP's effectiveness is just as much a function of the ineptitude of their opponents as it is anything the GOP and the media does itself.

Here we are in the midst of Republican scandal after scandal, having set a new high-water mark in their culture of corruption, and the Democrats are still against the ropes, unable to take a stand ... because they can't agree on anything.

Boy, are these guys in sore need of some love, because they are on testosterone overload, and it's making them a bit twitchy in a really scary way. This is just black-hearted:

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could â€œvalidateâ€? the Presidentâ€™s war on terror and allow Bush to â€œunite the countryâ€? in a â€œtime of national shock and sorrow.â€?

The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit itâ€™s a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are â€œblue sky thinkingâ€? that often occurs in political planning sessions.

Excuse me?

"Strategy"???? They actually want to let a terror attack happen to boost Republican esteem and morale?

â€œThe Presidentâ€™s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,â€? admits one aide. â€œAmericans band together at a time of crisis.â€?

Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country.

No shit. They don't want to be pointing that out.

Then again, the Republicans in power have proven themselves to be pretty adept at magical thinking and spin reality.

What's really depressing is that, given their avowed hatred of those who disagree with them, and the Christian leadership backing them, it's hard to simply dismiss such outrageous callousness and malice as out of the question.

Up until now, Republicans who don't fully buy into the rabid dog pro-criminalization agenda of the radical right have had to just shut up and pretend not to believe that a woman has a right to her own body.

The so-called "social conservatives" were probably counting on that when they called for an all-out culture war over the nomination of Samuel Alito. They hope to cow the majority of Americans who support reproductive rights while they embark on a concerted effort to get Alito confirmed.

ST. LOUIS - Former Gov. Christie Whitman called on moderate Republicans on Thursday to become more vocal within the party as she helped launch a new chapter of a GOP group that supports abortion rights.

Whitman said she fears the far right has too much power in her party, which she wants to return to core principles such as "the restriction of government intrusion into our everyday lives."

I confess I like Whitman. I lived in New York when she was governor of New Jersey, and got the sense that she was doing okay ... at least for a state that has such messed-up politics.

Her quitting Bush's EPA over principle also earned some of my respect.

Now her push on reproductive rights -- another voice in what I hope is a political trend to take undamental human and civil rights for women out of the distorting lens of party politics. I've always thought that the dominionist Republicans' neo-fascist ambitions were an odd mix with the corporatist Republicans' anti-regulation agenda -- unless we're talking nostalgia for the Victorian days portrayed in Dickens' Hard Times.

Whitman lent her support to the new chapter of the Republicans for Choice Committee, which is part of an effort by Republicans and Planned Parenthood to increase support for abortion rights within the party. The committee also supports funding for family planning programs and age-appropriate sex education.

Expect this Planned Parenthood endeavor to draw the embittered enmity of staunch Democratic Party supporters, especially those who've been asserting that any Democrat, even one of the "Democrats for Life," will back reproductive rights more than any Republican, even a pro-choice Republican. But given how wobbly and unreliable the Democrats have become on reproductive rights, I for one am glad that Planned Parenthood has joined NARAL in seeking out allies on both sides of the aisle. Let's hope this helps the silent majority find their voices and speak out against the extremists in their party.

John Hancock, a spokesman for the Missouri Republican Party, said he wasn't concerned about disagreement among party members over abortion rights.

"We are the majority party in America, and our two-party system necessitates a divergence of viewpoints within each political party," Hancock said. "We welcome the support of pro-choice Republicans and value the support of our pro-life Republicans as well."

I believe this is called having your cake and eating it, too. The intolerance of the "pro-life" position, which would bring politicians and the government into private medical decisions, would seem to preclude any acknowledgment, let alone acceptance, of pro-reproductive rights folks into the dialogue, let alone into their ranks. That's about as likely as the racial integration of the KKK.

For over 10 years, since the Republicans issued their Contract On America, we the people have been deluged with radical rightist rhetoric. They seemed to hit their stride during President Clinton's sex scandal, when philanderers and home-wreckers with at-best-questionable family histories themselves, started letting the spittle fly in supposedly sincere outrage over the president's own lapses. When the mainstream press enthusiastically fell into stride, the GOP leaders realized their time had come. Taking a page from propagandists of history, they pushed more and more outrageous claims, and the press reported them as facts.

When President Bush the lesser came into office, well, then the GOP machine, now driven with cold calculation by Karl Rove, really began to let the outrage fly. Distributing "anger points" (which the media more politely call "talking points") through their entitled networks, they worked the outrage game with more and more enthusiasm and venom.

And still the press played along, perhaps to the greatest consequence during the run-up to the Iraq war. Administration statements were reported as fact. GOP press releases were treated as evidence. The Republican leaders realized there was no refereeing of their game.

And we quickly reached the point where any criticism of Bush or his policies was labeled as anti-patriotic, if not outright traitorous.

The Democratic leaders noticed this, and played along, endorsing the war on Iraq with enthusiasm and as much would-be heroic posturing as the Republicans demonstrated.

Meanwhile, the GOP outrage machine built up steam, pushing outrage after outrage, tossing out lies as facts, building their own bubble of alternate reality. Fudging intelligence to fit war intentions, altering scientific studies to fit economic ambitions, painting a picture of lies making John Kerry, the decorated war veteran, into a lying coward and George W Bush, the draft-dodging partying trust-fund baby, into a war hero, gay couples destroying heterosexual couples' "sanctity," creationism as "scientifically proven," birth control causing pregnancy ... lies became truth, if you shouted it loud enough.

Maybe we caught a whiff of what was coming in the Terri Schiavo case. Never before did we see so much self-righteous posing at such high decibels. "Doctor" Bill Frist diagnosed her condition after watching a videotape, Tom DeLay advocated violence against judges, and when people didn't go along with it, they shouted louder and louder -- which has always worked in the past.

They were hurt by that, but it did not humble them. Since then they've kept up the outrageous claims and announced offensive policy objectives, one after the other, peppering us with a multi-front assault of "the conservative agenda."

And we ordinary citizens started to burn out.

It's hard to keep your energy up when the relentless outrage machine of Rove & Co. keeps assaulting you. How do you face it every day, when there's always something new? Tax cuts for the super-rich, dismantling Social Security, eliminating the founding American principle of bankruptcy protection.... When people like this are running the government, how does one hold out hope?

Katrina gets no respect

In a grand and vivid illustration of how context can change everything, suddenly we see the GOP political tactics for what they are. The outrage rhetoric doesn't work any more. The macho posing doesn't work any more. The hate card doesn't work any more.

Yes, people are burned out. But now it's not just progressives and liberals -- it's everyone. Bush's poll numbers are crashing, and the Republican leaders in Congress seem intent on digging holes for themselves, too.

Dennis Hastert says New Orleans isn't worth saving.

Rick Santorum says those who were stranded should be prosecuted for being left behind.

Now just about everybody is burned out on the Republican rhetoric of hate and complaint. Their gambit is failing. But they don't seem to realize it.

The political climate has changed. No longer does it make sense to have people running the government when they don't believe in government. No longer does it make sense to play sycophant to incompetence, insider politics, and indifference to the plight of ordinary Americans.

We Americans demand results. And we demand accountability. And if the Republicans think they can just spin their way out of this, they have another thing coming.